Women and girls face a winter curfew

I read with interest your report about Saoirse Ronan’s “brutally honest remark” that laid bare the unease many women feel daily (“Saoirse Ronan silences men on Graham Norton show with brutally honest remark”, Tuesday 29 October).

Violence against women and girls is an epidemic, and fears for personal safety are increasing. During the darker months, women feel they have no choice but to change how they exercise outdoors, altering their routes and routines when the sun goes down, or avoiding it completely. This isn’t just inconvenient – it’s an injustice.

Some will make the point that by addressing an issue so openly, we run the risk of scaremongering by dialling up fears and anxieties that were perhaps latent. While this issue both exists and persists, however, This Girl Can is staunchly of the mind that it is our role to address issues head-on, given the unfortunate truth is that women – as Saoirse showed – can never fully set aside concerns for their safety outside of their own front door.

What we need is for men to listen, take our concerns seriously and think about how they can be better allies, to think about the change they can bring professionally and personally. We need them to share in our outrage, and to be as angry about the issue as we are. It’s up to all of us to lift the curfew women face during the darker months.

Women deserve to feel confident, strong, and safe when they’re getting active, day or night, and we won’t stop until that becomes the reality.

Kate Dale

Director of marketing at Sport England and This Girl Can

The Conservative Party leadership contest is meandering to an end, if not a climax (“Tory leadership contest: What’s next for the party?”, Tuesday 29 October).

We will soon see the back of Rishi Sunak. He inherited in full the Tory vice of knowing what needs to be promised while lacking any sense that a promise should be kept. This included stopping the boats.

Daily footage of them bobbing towards our shore has been central. Even for those reckless enough not to mind them, impotence is not a quality admired in a leader.

Is it conceivable that Sunak imagined the public to have such trust in him that we had already ticked off the boats as a promise fulfilled?

John Riseley

Harrogate

I empathise with Angela Rayner and wholeheartedly believe that a four-day working week can be of benefit (“Kemi Badenoch and Angela Rayner clash over four-day week: ‘No threat to the economy’”, Tuesday 29 October).

In my place of work, we have been implementing a four-day working week – with no additional hours or reduction in pay – for over a year now. In that short time, we have witnessed a significant increase in productivity, engagement and overall staff satisfaction.

As part of her Employment Rights Bill, Rayner should include the right for employees to request the change to their working arrangement.

If we want our employees to be healthier and happier, and in return, boost our businesses, we need to start treating them like the adults they are and trust them to get on and do their jobs. Who better to embrace this long-overdue and heavily in-demand discussion than the deputy prime minister?

Alex Voakes

CEO at Peak PEO

I cannot agree with Professor Greta Nargund, as quoted in The Independent, when she claims that “we need a long-term and whole-government approach to increase the birth rate” (“Fertility rate for England and Wales plummets to lowest level since 1930s”, Monday 28 October).

There is a general scientific consensus, albeit as yet unaccompanied by any political consensus, that the effects of anthropogenic climate change pose an imminent existential threat to the population of the planet.

In some countries, notably in the UK, significant attempts are being made to reduce this threat by pursuing appropriate governmental policies. However, the more fundamental problem has been the rapid continual expansion in recent centuries of the global human population responsible for the activities which are causing the rise in atmospheric temperature.

There is thus an ongoing tension between commercial activity and environmental concerns. The current economic model, predicated on indefinite growth, is ultimately unsustainable.

What is really required is truly radical thinking with the aim of securing an acceptable standard of living for all people in ways that will not lead to their eventual extinction. Inevitably, this will involve an acceptance of a more modest lifestyle than that currently enjoyed amongst Earth’s most developed nations.

My fear is that this dilemma will not be addressed until the general pursuit of present policies internationally has passed the point at which it becomes catastrophic, by which time it will be far too late.

Geoffrey Collier

Yorkshire

Governments are rarely defined by a Budget – but this one may be a notable exception (“Rachel Reeves reveals £40bn in tax hikes and more borrowing in historic speech”, Wednesday 30 October).

Whether, through unforeseen events or self-inflicted gaffes, the first 100 days of Labour have undoubtedly failed to capture the public’s imagination. This Budget may break that cycle.

If Labour plays it right, this bleak period can still be consigned to history and allow the real mission, for real change that people voted for in July, to begin.

Paul Dolan

Cheshire